Elisabeth Tova Bailey Quotes
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Slime is the sticky essence of a gastropod’s soul, the medium for everything in its life: locomotion, defense, healing, courting, mating, and egg protection. Nearly one-third of my snail’s daily energy went into slime production. And rather than making a single batch of “all-purpose” slime, my snail had a species-specific recipe for each of these needs and for different parts of its body. It could adjust the ingredients, just as a good cook would, to meet a particular occasion. And in a catastrophic accident in which a snail is squashed, it can release a flood of lifesaving, medicinal mucus packed with antioxidants and regenerative properties.
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If a snail’s shell gets injured, a repair can be made quickly. New shell material is secreted by the mantle, and where there was once a crack, a scar appears, looking much like a skin scar. Even a missing shell section can be replaced. Oliver Goldsmith described this in 1774: Sometimes these animals are crushed seemingly to pieces, and, to all appearance, utterly destroyed; yet still they set themselves to work, and, in a few days, mend all their numerous breaches . . . to the re-establishment of the ruined habitation. But all the junctures are very easily seen, for they have a fresher colour than the rest; and the whole shell, in some measure, resembles an old coat patched with new pieces.
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Slugs, despite what one might think, given their naked look, do not predate snails on the evolutionary tree but were once snails that evolved over time to be shellless.
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The slant of sun would slowly steepen towards mid-day, then lengthen as it slowly fell away.
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EACH MORNING THERE WAS a moment, before I had fully awakened, when my mind still groped its clumsy way back to consciousness, my body not yet remembered, reality not yet acknowledged. That moment was always full of pure, sweet, uncontrollable hope. I did not ask for this hope to come; I did not even want it, for it trailed disappointment in its wake. Yet there it was, hovering within me—hope that my illness had vanished with the night and my health had returned magically with daybreak.
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There was no woodsy fragrance blowing through my room, and the snail, especially while it lived in the pot of violets, must have been surprised by the kaleidoscope of unfamiliar smells, the scent of humans, human food, tea, soap, paper, and ink.
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How wonderful it would be if we humans with illnesses could simply go dormant while the scientific world went about its snail-paced research, and wake only when new, safe medical treatments were available.
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I eagerly awaited visitors, but the anticipation and the extra energy of greetings caused a numbing exhaustion. As the first stories unfolded, my spirit held on to the conversation as best it could—I so wanted these connections to the outside world—but my body sank beneath waves of weakness. Still, my friends were golden threads randomly appearing in the monotonous fabric of my days. Each visit was a window that opened momentarily into the life I had once known, always falling shut before I could make my way back through. The visits were like dreams from which I awoke once more alone.
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The snail and I were both living in altered landscapes not of our choosing; I figured we shared a sense of loss and displacement.
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Life without a snail was hard to contemplate.
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WHEN THE BODY is rendered useless, the mind still runs like a bloodhound along well-worn trails of neurons, tracking the echoing questions: the confused family of whys, whats, and whens and their impossibly distant kin how. The search is exhaustive; the answers, elusive.
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Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.
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As I glided further into the dusty mollusk volumes, I discovered that gastropods - which account for 80 percent of all mollusks - are one of the most successful animal groups. They have existed for half a billion years, surviving or reevolving through several mass extinction events. They make their home in nearly every habitat on earth. While thirty-five thousand living terrestrial snail species have been documented, tens of thousands are not yet identified.
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THERE IS A CERTAIN depth of illness that is piercing in its isolation; the only rule of existence is uncertainty, and the only movement is the passage of time. One cannot bear to live through another loss of function, and sometimes friends and family cannot bear to watch. An unspoken, unbridgeable divide may widen. Even if you are still who you were, you cannot actually fully be who you are. Sometimes the people you know well withdraw, and then even the person you know as yourself begins to change.
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Survival often depends on a specific focus: A relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility. Or something more ephemeral: the way the sun passes through the hard seemingly impenetrable glass of a window and warms the blanket, or how the wind, invisible but for its wake, is so loud one can hear it through the insulated walls of a house.
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Millions of centuries of voyaging via animals, water, and wind brought my snail's family to colonize the woods near where I was staying. It was by chance that my snail's path had intersected with a human trail, just as a friend - the sort of friend who stopped for a snail - was passing by. The history of gastropod travel now included the unexpected journey of my own snail, which had arrived at my bedside by human transport.
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With its mysterious, fluid movement, the snail was the quintessential tai chi master.
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Was this truly a door that I would someday open and walk through, as if walking out into the world were an ordinary thing to do?
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Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole.
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The snail had been a true mentor; its tiny existence had sustained me. Late one winter night I wrote in my journal: A last look at the stars and then to sleep. Lots to do at whatever pace I can go. I must remember the snail. Always remember the snail.
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THERE IS A CERTAIN depth of illness that is piercing in its isolation; the only rule of existence is uncertainty, and the only movement is the passage of time.
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The right thing to do is to do nothing, the place to do it is in a place of concealment and the time to do it is as often as possible.
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The crucial first step to survival in all organisms is habitat selection. If you get to the right place, everything else is likely to be easier.
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We are all hostages of time. We each have the same number of minutes and hours to live within a day, yet to me it didn't feel equally doled out. My illness brought me such an abundance of time that time was nearly all I had. My friends had so little time that I often wished I could give them what time I could not use. It was perplexing how in losing health I had gained something so coveted but to so little purpose.